The Welsh painter Augustus Edwin John (1878-1961) was the leading British portraitist of his period and a brilliant draftsman.

Augustus John was born on Jan. 4, 1878, in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, and studied art at the Slade School in London. The Slade placed great emphasis on draftsmanship, and John soon attracted attention by the vitality and accomplishment of his drawings. His painting technique, which was slower to develop, at first revealed his attempt to combine the tradition of dark-toned impressionism current among artists of the New English Art Club with something of the grandeur of Rembrandt and other Old Masters, but gradually John began to work with brighter colors and a more simplified composition. This tendency reached its peak about 1911-1914 in a series of small, brilliantly colored paintings executed in North Wales, the majority of which showed figures (usually his second wife, Dorelia, and one or more of their children...